


Keystones

by AeroXIV



Series: After Meteor [1]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:21:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27690626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AeroXIV/pseuds/AeroXIV
Summary: In the aftermath of the Crimson Moon Dalamud's fall, a lone mother tries to remember the face of the son who answered the call to war.
Series: After Meteor [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2024990
Kudos: 2





	Keystones

“But every end marks a new beginning…”  
\- Final Fantasy XIV

After Meteor  
Keystones

Once more, she finds herself retreating into her memories, to a time before the red moon fell. Her boy is younger, adolescent, but always her boy. They spend their days on the La Noscean beaches and their nights by the fire in the home he built. She is wearing a dress, loose and free-flowing. A careless ensemble. Her boy swims on the horizon and in pursuit she wades through the waters. Her dress blooms like the head of a jellyfish as she swims out to meet him, but he is always further than her fingertips, slipping through her hands like the Rhotano Sea itself.   
He is like that, always called to something: the sun on the horizon, a shell on the beach, a sword on the battlefield. Sometimes she believes he is meant for so much more than their little home by the sea.   
Inside the bone walls of her skull a fire burns, and she cannot help but squint at her boy, no longer swimming, but floating above the water. He is taller. Featureless. Bright as the light of the Mothercrystal. Her thoughts are stunted by the strain of a mind struggling to remember what it has forgotten. Is it right that a mother could so soon forget the face of her son? There is a fragment of her memory, seared and stolen. A name that once found its home there, that was born there. Gone. The shade opens its arms wide but not for her. It is a body that could belong to anyone, but so badly she wants to believe it is him. He shines brighter, with absolute brilliance and in a wash of blue light vanishes.  
Water catches her face and in a single, icy breath the sky is grey, and the sun is faded. Shivering, she musters the strength to fight through the water and back onto the damp beach before collapsing onto the sand. She cries. The sea deposits driftwood and forgotten things and then rushes back in to claim them again, as a child might with a meal they are unsure they want to eat.

Wringing her hair of seawater, she settles down at the small campfire. Her home is a crudely assembled hut made from the remnants of her first lodging, only a stone’s throw from the crater it became. It is the second thing she has lost to the dreadwyrm, and so she claimed what she could from the smouldering wreckage. Because each pattern in the wood is more memorable to her now than the freckles on her boy's face.   
Lowland grapes for dinner, once again, picked too early and sour, but there is little she can enjoy until the fog from her mind is lifted. She dries her clothes on a line near the fire and looks at her ribs, her malnourished stomach. Her thinning hair. He had always loved playing with it, and she would always wear it down for him, even though she preferred it out of the way. ‘Grow your own hair out you dandy!’ She would tell him.  
Sighing, she puts the grapes into her satchel and feigns sleep. Atrophy. Her body, her soul, her very aether, is wasting away. Being wasted, some might say. But either her mind would return what it has hidden, or she would find him in the six heavens, or the six hells. 

The time for prosperity is over, and the thriving markets are replaced with the dilapidated stalls of desperate hustlers. The Calamity ushered in the Seventh Umbral Era, and the world is still turning in the shadow of the fallen moon, and all the blood spilt with it. Astral, or Umbral, she cares not. Her own Calamity is not of the moon, nor dreadwyrm alone, she believes. It is born of the Garlean incursion, and her own failing mind.  
Of the shade she uncovers nothing more, and despite the blistering of her feet on the stones, or the stabbing thorns of abandoned forests, she cannot recollect him. Her journey takes her to locations from the boy’s youth, places of vivid memory, of unforgettable times. Their world is warped, formations of towering crystals burst from the cliffside, fauna has blossomed without regard, but despite this, each clearing, each pond, keeps its familiarity. Funny, how even the curve of a rock is more memorable than the curve of his nose. She feels her own and tries to construct him in her image.   
It does not work.

Waves batter against the cliffside, concealing a pit of stone spires, their piercing tips visible only as sea retreats, and prepares to break upon the stone once again. Perhaps this is how it is for the generals watching their men, a wave under a flag, breaking themselves upon the invaders. Maybe, in all the faces she has seen, Admiral Bloefhiswyn remembers her boy, though only as another in the crowd. And is that remembering at all?   
The winds howl with Llymlaen’s fury, and she howls back, a chorus of grief. For a moment she considers prayer, but which of the Twelve should she pray too? And for what? To give back what has been taken, to chart her on a new course? Maybe to lower the tide just long enough so that she too might break herself on the blades below. She stands, her toes closer to air than rock, jutting out further than the grass would dare. The thought of flight sinks down into her stomach.   
It would only take a single movement. Or, if she were a coward, a strong wind.   
Which hell did cowards belong to? Ice, she thinks. Coerthas, in their endless winter, then, is full of cowards. They survive without the help of the world.  
The drop seems longer, pulling downwards, like watching the world through a glass. It is beckoning, willing her to fall. Pulling the blood from her face.  
It will only be a moment of pain. At worst, she would leave a red trail on a white cliff, perhaps break bones before she reaches the bottom. The crabs would see to it she would need no burial, no pyre. Hers would be a convenient death, with no sorrow, and no busywork. The tides would clean the stone, and the red froth of the waves would vanish within the hour.  
She clasps her hands together and looks to the sky, as though she were the Statue of Llymlaen given flesh. She moves her leg. There is sobbing, child-like, in the silence between the winds choir.   
It is a sound without melody, and it makes her eyes tear. For a moment she considers this may indeed be another vision, that when she casts her eyes downward she would see the brilliant shade once more. That vaguely familiar silhouette of brightest light.  
‘I can’t look on you, and not see you again. Are you my boy, or my tormentor? A trick,’ She digs her fingers into her hands. ‘If you are not my boy, then…’ Push me.  
From behind the settling night, and the spray of ocean waves, two round, impossibly yellow eyes look up at her. They are bright, like a cat hiding in the shadows of a fire. Golden buttons. It takes a moment for her own to take to the dark, and as they do it reveals a form: a creature entirely round, almost like a rabbit covered in soot. But much bigger, as big as a child and rounder.   
Its thin arms and gentle hands are clasped in imitation. It stands beside her, opens its mouth showing brilliant white teeth, jagged like a snowy mountainscape. It moves as if to say something and then looks away from her.  
She does the same, and then slowly peers back.  
Just as the waves are repelled from the cliffs only to rush them once more, they repeat this cautious dance. 

It is a Spriggan, she thinks, an omen of good fortune to the miners. A trickster, she has heard. Once its crying stops, she walks away from the edge, and hears the patter of little feet shuffling in the grass. She stops, and so do they.  
Turning she sees it hide behind a rock.   
Then the feet follow again once she begins to move.  
Stop. Turn. Hide. Walk.   
‘Are you coming, or not?’ She is unsure if the creature can understand her, what language do fairies speak? Or is it a Sprite? Or some kind of...Kin. It is rare that one would ever encounter a Spriggan, it is not something she has put effort into learning.  
There was a time she may have been fearful of meeting a creature such as this in the dark, but not tonight. Not now.   
She offers out her hand and it takes a finger as they walk away from the cliff together. It is a silent journey. Its ”fur” is neither soft, nor soot-like to the touch: it reminds her of metal shavings, all willed together around a core. 

If one would ask her why she walked away from the cliff, then she could not answer the question. Curiosity? Bewilderment?   
She lights a fire, for her more than the creature beside her. It does not look well: it is thin, and its tall ears droop like the broken antennae of a crushed moth. Did it approach because it too is suffering? Only in the revealing light of the fire does she notice something most important absent from the Spriggan: its rock.  
‘Are you missing something too?’ She asks with a motherly tone.  
It fusses its hands and nods.   
‘Is it your rock?’  
It begins to whimper, and cough.   
‘I lost my one too, is that why you stood by me?’   
A word enters her mind again: atrophy, the creature is decaying, wasting, its aether weak; they both have lost their tether to this life. It is hard for her not to consider that fate might have conspired to bring them together, that perhaps two reflections might understand each other.   
‘Will you eat?’ She offers some of her grapes.  
It looks at her hands, and then at her. With an exaggerated breath, she chomps on the grape and rubs her stomach. ‘It’s good to eat, because if we eat, we can keep looking for our rocks.’ Hypocritical, maybe, but her advice is solid.   
Its legs kick in the air as it struggles from atop the small rock it is sitting on, the Spriggan rolls it forward in front of the fire, takes a deep breath, and chomps the rock. She jumps back slightly and drops her grapes.   
It stares at her with those blank, yellow eyes, and coughs up dust. The clearing is silent, only the fire crackles as they observe each other. She giggles, and it does something of the sort.   
‘Perhaps, in the morning, we could look for your rock?’  
It slumps itself down next to her and nods. Then points at her.  
‘Yes, maybe we will find mine too.’

The day is neither bright, nor fresh, but it is real - as real as her new companion. She has not thought of how others might react when she arrives at the marketplace, but that is where they will start their journey, she has decided.  
Though they have their moments of sorrow together they find strength in each other. As she walks the beach the Spriggan gives her a shell, and for the first time in a year she does not see the bright image of a boy on the horizon, but a small, black shadow sifting through the shore-line, and its rocky alcoves. She gives him strength, and she thinks that he may be a blessing for her too.  
The time for old memories is passing, and even in the dark she thinks this Umbral Era may hold hope for them after all.


End file.
